The Best Old Movies On a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, Feb 4-10

Ganja and Hess (1973)
Directed by Bill Gunn
Transposing the unfettered, slipshod visual language of exploitation into outright Impressionism, Gunn’s vampire movie is one of the most multifaceted works of African-American cinema. Its protagonist is the embodiment of a primal, pagan spirit and an assimilated, bourgeois oppressor of the poor, a split that illustrates themes ranging from the intersection of African spirituality and institutional Christianity to the heterogeneous and contradiction of black identity. Blood is its central image, and the mixture of lust and revulsion with which it is viewed sets the thematic and emotional tenor for a movie with no clear interpretation. Jake Cole (Feb 7, 5pm; Feb 8, 8pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York”)